Buckley: War defines Bush's failure

Updated 10:00 pm, Saturday, April 8, 2006

William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure.

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," Buckley said in a recent interview on Bloomberg Television. "If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam."

Buckley said one of the primary faults of the Iraq war strategy was that that the United States "anticipated almost immediate success." He said "that punishes us as days go by."

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Buckley also criticized the so-called neo-conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion and the spreading of U.S. values around the world.

"The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country," Buckley said.

Looking ahead to the 2008 presidential election, Buckley said a strong Republican candidate for the race has yet to emerge. "I don't find a commanding presence sort of knocking on the door" for the next presidential campaign, he said, while expressing little enthusiasm for the current front-runner, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

"I don't think that his name comes to mind automatically as somebody who over a period of years has addressed problems with fruitful thinking, let alone with consistent thinking," Buckley said.

And, somewhat surprising, he had a few compliments for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, a favorite target of many conservatives. Clinton is "a very consequential woman with an extraordinary background," he said. "Her thought is kind of woozy left, not in my judgment threatening."

She is "a phenomenon, a woman candidate who might easily be president," Buckley said.

Buckley, often called the father of contemporary conservatism in America, long articulated his beliefs in National Review magazine, which he founded in 1955. His conservatism calls for small government, low taxes and a strong defense. Both Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater said they got their inspiration from the magazine.

While praising Bush as "really a conservative," he was critical of the president for allowing expansion of the federal government and never vetoing a spending bill.

The president's "concern has been so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have neglected conservatism on the fiscal level, Buckley said.

Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure."

The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president," adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility."

Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime friend, "a failed executor"' of the war. And Vice President Dick Cheney "was flatly misled," Buckley said. "He believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction."

Buckley exalted in what he sees as the conservative success stemming from his call a half century ago in the National Review to "stand athwart history and yell stop."

That, he remembered, was when Marxism was widely considered "an absolute irreversible call of history." The folly of that notion was demonstrated by the demise of communism a decade and a half ago, he said.

Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. "I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us,"' he said.

Buckley also said he found the business community's contribution to society during most of the period from the 1950s to 1970s "disappointing" because of "their refusal to encourage an intellectual light. Now, that has changed."

"There are a number of foundations and colleges that take seriously the teaching of liberalism and libertarian life" with the assistance of business leaders, he said. "But I don't think a historian looking back on the last 50 years of the 20th century will have any reason to speak with convincing pride about the role of the American businessmen in public policy."

Buckley offered his perspectives on recent presidents:

Richard Nixon "was one of the brightest people who ever occupied the White House," he said, "but he suffered from basic derangements," which precipitated his own downfall.

Ronald Reagan "confounded the intellectual class, which disdained him." Every year though, Buckley said, "there is more and more evidence of his ingenuity, of his historical intelligence."

Bill Clinton "is the most gifted politician of, certainly my time," Buckley said. "He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with a capacity for mischief which is very, very American." He doubted that "anyone could begin to write a textbook that explicates his (Clinton's) political philosophy because he doesn't really have one."